Welsh History Month: The Lonsdale Belt

What is the most important object in Welsh history? Today Dr Paul O'Leary, from Aberystwyth University, argues the case for The Lonsdale belt

Jim Driscoll and Charles Ledoux seen here during their European bantamweight title fight at the National Sports Club in Covent Garden

Since the first modern Olympics held at Athens in 1897 athletes competing in the world’s greatest sporting festival have measured their success by whether they win gold, silver or bronze medals. Football and rugby teams compete for trophies in the shape of cups and shields.

But in British boxing in the 20th century it was the ornate and decorated Lonsdale belt that was the most visible sign of success in the ring. This was awarded to British champions at different weights.

The first boxer to win a Lonsdale belt was the lightweight champion Freddie Welsh of Pontypridd in 1909. In fact, of the first eight Lonsdale belts awarded in the years 1909-1914 from flyweight to heavyweight categories of competition ? three were won by Welsh boxers.

As well as Freddie Welsh, “Peerless” Jim Driscoll of Cardiff won the first belt at featherweight, and Tom Thomas of the Rhondda won the first belt at middleweight. Other Welsh boxers would also distinguish themselves in this way throughout the 20th century.

The Lonsdale belt originated with the 5th Earl of Lonsdale, Hugh Cecil Lowther. A keen enthusiast of many sports, Lowther became the president of the National Sporting Club in London and he bequeathed the first belt that carried his name as a boxing championship trophy in 1909. The original Lonsdale belts were crafted from porcelain and were 22-carat gold with a red, white and blue fabric backing. Later nine-carat gold was used.

On the few occasions these belts have been auctioned they have been bought for tens of thousands of pounds.

This curious object provides us with a way of understanding what was once a popular leisure activity among men. So why a belt as a symbol of success? And why was it so significant in 20th-century Wales?

Before the 19th century belts were presented to winners of boxing and wrestling contests, but in the Victorian era this practice took on a new dimension. Increasingly they were presented by aristocratic patrons or by newspapers. For example in 1866 the pugilist Jem Mace was presented with a belt by the Illustrated Sporting News. The Lonsdale belt fits this pattern of patronage for sporting success.

The intricate decoration and the expensive materials used made these objects valued trophies.

Initially a boxer kept his Lonsdale belt if he defended it successfully on two occasions, although that practice changed later when it became more difficult to retain the trophy.

Dinner jackets and respectability

The National Sporting Club had been founded at Covent Garden in 1891. It put on professional contests under the rules codified under the Marquess of Queensberry in 1867. Its president was the Earl of Lonsdale and its membership was drawn from groups of men in the more well-to-do echelons of London society. These included wealthy merchants, bookmakers and sporting aristocrats and they would invite professional boxers to entertain them in after-dinner bouts.

The connection between wearing formal evening dress to watch boxing probably stems from this club and this time.

But the gap between this and the older and rougher tradition of prize-fighting was not always as wide as some people hoped. The death of a boxer in a fight at Swansea in 1896 prompted one newspaper to say “we do protest strongly against the general prevalence of glove fighting in the boxing saloons of our large towns”.

Similarly, when a fatality occurred at the National Sporting Club in 1897, Cardiff’s Evening Express newspaper canvassed opinions on the significance of what had happened. Some people complained of the brutality of boxing as a sport and they emphasised the inevitable physical damage to participants that resulted.

However, Lord Lonsdale was unrepentant in the face of what he described as “an old womanish agitation” against the sport. The Queensberry rules had, he claimed, made the sport more civilised. Boxing was “a healthy, manly, and an invigorating pastime”.

Boxing never managed to shake off entirely the controversy it attracted in the 1890s. The debate about the danger of boxing as a sport would rear its head again in much the same way many times in the 20th century.

’Scientific’ boxing

However, Lonsdale was willing to accept the need for one reform of the sport. He argued that referees should intervene when one boxer was visibly weaker and on the receiving end of too much punishment.

“All the pleasure of boxing consists in the display of science,” Lonsdale said, “and there is nothing scientific, but, rather, everything repulsive, in the spectacle of a man being punched round the ring when he is too weak to defend himself.”

This reference to “science” was significant. Scientific boxing was based on defeating an opponent by speed and knowledge of an opponent’s strengths and weaknesses rather than relying simply on brawn and grinding the opponent down by inflicting a large number of punches. Cardiff’s Jim Driscoll was praised as the “complete scientific boxer” because of his agility and his ability to avoid punishing treatment.

Scientific boxing as a style of fighting in the ring had been pioneered by the American fighter, James J Corbett, who had beaten John L Sullivan in 1892 in the first championship fight under the Queensberry rules. This was the first decisive move away from the dangerous and bloody world of the brawling prize fighter and a tentative step towards acceptance by the wider society.

Talk of “manliness”, scientific boxing and the Queensberry rules is a reminder that aristocratic approval for fighting came at a time when boxing was still trying to shake off its reputation for brutality and semi-legality.

Boxing booths

If the rarefied atmosphere of the National Sporting Club was one world in which boxing thrived before the First World War, then the boxing booths of fair days and holidays were the others. It was in this very different world to that of Covent Garden that most boxers learned their craft.

Before Freddie Welsh, Jim Driscoll and Tom Thomas became champions they toured in sideshows in places like the Rhondda. So did champions like Jimmy Wilde. At that time Rhondda was a booming industrial society. These raw townships in the Valleys were boisterous places with large populations of young males who had been attracted by the good wages to be had mining coal by pick and shovel.

In these places, colliers enjoying their rare leisure hours fancied their chances against less well built fairground boxers such as Driscoll and Welsh. These bouts acquired an added edge from gambling. As well as the boxing spectacle, the promoter often ensured that there would be betting on contests, thus introducing boxers to the world of working-class betting in sport.

The daunting experience of performing against all-comers a number of times each day ensured that the young boxers’ reflexes were sharpened and their defensive skills were well honed. In the booths they gained valuable sparring practice and built up their stamina. This stood them in good stead in the very long bouts of their professional career that were normal at the time.

Some of these were escaping from hardship and poverty. That was certainly true of Jim Driscoll who was born and brought up in Newtown, a mainly Irish area of Cardiff.

Less than a year after he was born, his father was killed in a tragic accident in a goods yard near his home. This left his mother, Elizabeth, and a family of four children to fend for themselves in acute poverty. By 1891 – when Jim was 10 years old – the family was in an overcrowded household of 10 people. It was in this environment of grinding poverty that Jim Driscoll grew up.

Similarly, Jimmy Wilde (“The Mighty Atom”) was the son of a coal miner and worked in the pits himself. He started boxing at the age of 16 in fairground boxing booths.

By contrast, Freddie Welsh came from a middle-class background and was sent to a public school where he learned the benefits of “physical culture”. He went to America where he took up boxing to make a living and turned professional.

When he returned to Britain to box in 1907 he was criticised for his “ungentlemanly” way of fighting. After a fight that year he was described as having “aped everything American – in manner and in speech; in fact, in every way he had become truly Yankee”.

Welsh v Driscoll

The clash between the American and British styles of fighting was clear in a famous fight when Welsh fought Jim Driscoll in 1910.

The preparations for the match did not augur well for a display of skill worthy of the two athletes. The two had been firm friends, but the pre-fight tension was so intense that by the time the bout took place the friendship had evaporated.

The fight took place at the American Roller Rink in Cardiff. Welsh dominated the opening rounds. He avoided Driscoll’s famous straight left by clinching his opponent and throwing illegal kidney punches.

By the sixth round both boxers were annoyed by the way the fight was developing and it was clear that Driscoll was being prevented from displaying his superb style. He finally snapped in the 10th round, responding to Welsh’s persistent foul play by head-butting him full in the face. The referee disqualified him.

There had been attempts to get the fight stopped on the grounds that it prejudiced the morality of Cardiff. A petition signed by local citizens, including the Bishop of Llandaff and the president of the Cardiff Free Church Council believed that the contest “would have a degrading effect upon the people”.

While many welcomed the opportunity to view the spectacle of the two most successful Welsh boxers of the day pitted against one another, others felt that the sight of two men seeking to knock each other out did little to add to the sum of human happiness.

Against the background of this controversy it must be remembered that boxing was remarkably popular before the First World War. For example, in August 1909 Freddie Welsh had beaten the Frenchman Henri Piet at Mountain Ash in the Cynon Valley before an audience numbering 15,000.

In spite of the sport’s popularity, however, the legal status of boxing remained ambiguous in the years immediately preceding the war.

At this time a scheduled fight between Jim Driscoll and the Birmingham boxer Owen Moran was banned in case it caused a breach of the peace. An appeal supported by Lord Lonsdale failed to overturn this decision, but the Crown eventually withdrew its objections and the fight went ahead in January 1913, ending in a disappointing draw.

Nevertheless, this fight was a legal turning point. Afterwards the law made no further interventions to try to stop a boxing match.

Battling between the wars

Some of the pre-1914 boxers had careers that spanned the First World War. Freddie Welsh and Jim Driscoll served in the armed forces – Welsh with the Americans and Driscoll with the British.

But their post-war careers were not distinguished. Welsh’s boxing career wound down in the post-war years. Wilde retired from the sport in 1923, and Driscoll died of pneumonia in 1925 at the age of 44.

Despite making a considerable amount of money from boxing, Wilde, Welsh and Driscoll all died in relative poverty.

With the passing of that generation of pre-war boxers, others came to the fore. Welsh winners of the Lonsdale belt during the 1930s included Jack Peterson and Tommy Farr. Petersen, from Cardiff, won the British and Commonwealth Heavyweight titles during the first half of the decade.

With the establishment of the British Board of Boxing Control in 1929 the National Sporting Club lost its control of the sport, and the Board of Boxing Control took over issuing Lonsdale belts from 1936 onwards.

Now the belts became the property of any champion who won three title fights in a division. Of the first eight belts awarded by the body only one was won by a Welshman. This was Tommy Farr of the Rhondda.

Born at Clydach Vale, Tommy Farr was known as the “Tonypandy Terror”. He was a renowned heavyweight fighter who controversially lost a world-title bout against the American Joe Louis in 1937.

Before 1914 boxing matches had been filmed and were shown later at cinemas but the availability of radio between the wars meant that although the 1937 fight took place in New York it could be heard live in Tonypandy in the middle of the night. This event made Tommy Farr a hero, despite him losing the bout.

After 1945 it seemed as though Welsh boxing was entering a new golden era. Joe Erskine from Butetown and Johnny Williams of Barmouth both won the British heavyweight title and the British Empire heavyweight title in the 1950s and Howard Winstone of Merthyr Tydfil became featherweight champion in the 1960s.

Several of these boxers won the new accolade of BBC Wales Sports Personality of the Year but the relationship of boxing to Welsh society was slowly changing.

Since the 1960s boxing has ceased to occupy the central position in the lives of working-class men that once it did.

This form of combative masculinity is less suited to a world in which the ability to fight is no longer as prized an achievement as it once was.

Boxing and modern Wales

So what does a history of Welsh winners of the Lonsdale belt tell us about the modern history of Wales?

Lord Lonsdale had claimed in 1897 that boxing was “manly”, whereas criticism of the pastime was “womanish”. His choice of words reveals something significant about a period when boxing was in the process of achieving respectability as a sport. At that time women were denied the vote and were treated as second-class citizens. “Manliness” was considered the apogee of public life and behaviour.

That idea came under considerable strain as women increasingly gained political rights and greater social opportunities as the 20th century wore on.

Affluence and concerns about the health risks of boxing also reduced its appeal.

The death of Johnny Owen of Merthyr – another Lonsdale belt winner – in 1980 at the age of 24 after being injured in a professional bout re-ignited the debate of the 1890s.

Back in 1897 Lord Lonsdale had blamed such tragedies on the poor preparation of the fighters.

By 1980 attitudes to the sport had changed dramatically. The number of professional boxers had fallen. With the collapse of heavy industry in those areas of the country that had been the sport’s heartlands, boxing was not as central to male leisure time in the way it had once been.

Wales continued to produce fighters of world-class status – Colin Jones of Gorseinon, Floyd Havard of Swansea, Joe Calzaghe of Newbridge, Enzo Maccarinelli of Swansea – and some could still win BBC Wales’s Sports Personality of the Year award. But increasingly, others questioned whether fighting of this kind ought to be considered a sport at all.

Against this background the history of the Lonsdale belt tells us something important about changing attitudes to physical culture and the body in 20th-century Wales.

Lord Lonsdale might have been a very English aristocrat but the numerous Welshmen who won the belt named after him inhabited a very different world of trans-Atlantic popular culture.

The Lonsdale belt is an object that provides one way of understanding that world of combative masculinity.

Recently Published

The Waverley, which has undergone a £7m restoration over the last four decades, will sail on the Bristol Channel for three week this summer to mark the 40th anniversary of her sale to the Paddle Steamer Preservation Society

WalesOnline is part of Media Wales, publisher of the Western Mail, South Wales Echo, Wales on Sunday and the seven Celtic weekly titles, offering you unique access to our audience across Wales online and in print.